Does The World Speak English?

Any English formed without reference to the literary tradition is no English at all. I mean, have you ever heard it, or read it? It is an affront to English-speakers everywhere to suggest that the world "speaks English" when, if anything, it speaks that.

It would be much better, in every way, to learn the languages of the rising powers, in all the richness of those languages, than to submit to such rule of that as there might be in 30 years' times.

Power is shifting to countries where the elites have never spoken English, or increasingly do not not speak it even though they used to, or, as set out above, do not speak it very well.

Our own world city is the only city in these Islands where fewer than half of primary school age children now speak English at home, making it less part of any "Anglosphere" than Dublin is.

Even the United States is effectively bilingual; no one seriously doubts that all Presidents after the Trump-Biden generation will be more than competent speakers of Spanish, or else they would not be able to be elected. As much as anything else, Florida and Nevada are swing states.

There is no "Anglosphere". There never has been. For most of the history of the American Republic, it had an explicitly anti-British policy of economic protectionism, a policy that was phenomenally successful in its own terms.

On extremely exacting terms, the United States entered the Second World War only once it had been directly attacked, as it had entered the First World War only when it had reasonably believed that it was about to be.

Still, a million people in the United Kingdom are already employed by American companies, while a million people in the United States are already employed by British companies. So where is the need for a free trade agreement?

This whole thing is being mooted purely in order to threaten the National Health Service. Including by greatly reducing workers' rights and food standards, reductions that would both do immense damage to public health.

And as for the Commonwealth, countries with no historical connection to Britain have now joined it as an expression of common anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle with their neighbours, probably without having given Britain a thought.

The Commonwealth never was a free trade area. Not even the Empire was. Canada and Australia have particularly long histories of particularly fierce protectionism, as did India from independence until the early 1990s, and still to a remarkable extent today.

Canada even waited a week before declaring war in September 1939, and insisted on holding a parliamentary vote before doing so. War between Commonwealth countries is routine, and war between Commonwealth Realms is not unheard of.

The Commonwealth organises student exchanges, and the Commonwealth Games, and so on. Long may it continue to do so. But that is all that it does, has ever done, or is ever going to do. There is no "Anglosphere". There never has been.

The problem with the EU Customs Union, which we have still not left, is not that it cuts us off from the Commonwealth, or from the "Anglosphere". The problem with the EU Customs Union is that it prevents us from protecting our own economy while cutting us off from the world.